The future state of Ross Avenue is as revolutionary as it has ever been. Past live were chock full of dingy dirty warehouses, slimy used car dealerships, whorehouses, a silk stocking row of the finest homes in North Texas, an undesirable neighborhood that sheltered the beginnings of the North Texas gay scene. Ross Avenue lived as the "Uptown" of the past where the most expensive rents budded off the Central Business District. The Arts District is turning that whole downtown area into a completely new type of city neighborhood, a world city.

All that social and cultural change will continue for at least another generation as Ross Avenue is refocused again with Shraman South Asian Museum, Headington, and Spire. We've discussed for a few years now the conditions, amenities and quality of life along McKinney Avenue. We'll have similar discussions about Ross as the inevitable repair to the streetscape comes on line.

The walk from the Texas Book Depository to the Latino Cultural Center will be the guide to municipal grooming of Ross Avenue. If not because it's the right thing for a community to do, then because that's the foundation of a powerful 'economic engine.'

I guess we've seen this emerge for some time now, but can it be said that 'logistics' is to Dallas as oil is to Houston? What was once marketed as the Dallas Inland Port (among other names!) is thriving.

One Los Angeles/Long Beach Port logistics company pioneered in South Dallas County with the Dallas Intermodal Port and after a decade of whatever-you-want-to-call-it, another LA/LBC logistic company is taking over, calling it Southport Logistics Park. I missed that Xebec relocated it's HQ to Dallas.

Alliance is no joke! NAFTA and Perot made that happen and it's a globally acknowledged operation now; some may believe political wheel-greasing kept the South Dallas initiative hibernating while Alliance laid it's foundation, but the regional economy clearly supports two largest scale cargo shuffling operations, and not to be forgotten is DFW Airport.

Payback from China and other countries to Trump's trade actions now covers billions of dollars' worth of Texas exports, according to data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. That hit, focused on the ag and energy industries, appears to be greater than what's being felt in any other U.S. state.

Texas has likewise borne the brunt of Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs. The state would also feel a keen impact if the U.S. ends up imposing levies on imported cars or if China follows through on a pledge to slap duties on crude oil, petrochemicals and other Texas stalwarts.

No corner of the Texas economy is likely to go untouched.

...Many Texas farmers are trying to stay optimistic, especially since Trump has promised to protect a community he talks about with near-reverence...."There are limitations to what China will be able to do, in part because China has a lot more to lose," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing and a supporter of Trump's trade approach.

In all the turbulence and turmoil, someone will find a way to make tons of money off the media hyped trade war.

You know the Dallas area economy is absolutely SIZZLING RED HOT when you have 1,000,000 square feet of retail space being dumped back onto the market yet at the same time the demand is so great that our 2Q18 retail occupancy rate INCREASES and comes close to setting a new all-time high!

While the U.S. had its worst quarter of retail absorption since the recession, Dallas came close to setting a new occupancy record.

Retail occupancy edged up in Q2 to 92.5%, the second-highest rate in 30 years, just behind the 92.7% occupancy at year-end 2016.

That number is a little surprising considering the 1M SF of vacancy hitting the market from Sears and Toys R Us closings alone (which are hurting occupancies nationwide), but big box-space has been backfilling nicely, Weitzman data shows.

"The market has been able to maintain steady occupancy in the face of some major store closings because the closures are being largely offset by pre-leased new construction and the backfilling of large vacancies," Weitzman's Q2 report said....Construction is still churning strong in DFW, and Weitzman predicts deliveries in 2018 will mirror the 4.1M SF that delivered last year. ...Weitzman has tracked 3.5M SF of retail underway or with announced openings this year, which will push DFW's retail inventory over 200M SF for the first time. And that isn't anything to worry about.

"The outlook for the DFW retail market in 2018 and going into 2019 remains strongly positive as retail is supported by growth in the key areas of population, job gains and single- and multifamily housing deliveries," Weitzman said.

With a humming North Texas economy as the backdrop, the DFW office market concluded the second quarter with 329K SF of direct net absorption, its 28th consecutive quarter of leasing gains, according to PMRG’s Q2 Dallas-Fort Worth Office Market report.

Year-to-date [net] absorption increased to approximately 1.3M SF, according to the report....Absorption in subsequent quarters should get a boost from several significant lease signings during Q2, including Samsung Electronics (216K SF), Darling Ingredients (95K SF), Genpact (95K SF) and GAINSCO Insurance (87K SF)....The DFW region should continue its expansionary phase through the second half of 2018, barring an unforeseen national recession or negative geo-political event.

The region’s strong employment and population growth, diversified economy and low costs of doing business should lead to above-average performance, according to PMRG Research. Among the metropolitan markets with a workforce over 1 million, the DFW Metroplex ranks first in annual employment gains, ahead of New York-Newark-New Jersey.

* Houston seeing historically high vacancy with continued negative absorption including ongoing large-scale lease dispositions and an occupancy rate at its lowest level in 30+ years,

* No silver bullet to bring a timely healing as energy companies, backbone of Houston office tenants for almost a century, continue to remain stagnant and many are shedding space

* It’s been so long since Houston scored a major league win in the corporate relocation game, it’s hard to hold hope that economic development can do anything substantive about Houston’s vacancy problem.

* JLL reports leasing demand is “stagnant.” Houston has lost ground in 2018, with 2.4 million SF in negative absorption year-to-date, JLL says.

* Vacancy rate will grow even greater in coming year with no end in sight

Cord1936 wrote:* It’s been so long since Houston scored a major league win in the corporate relocation game, it’s hard to hold hope that economic development can do anything substantive about Houston’s vacancy problem.

Is this referring to the entire Metropolitan area, or just Houston proper? I'm not as familiar with Houston, so I wasn't sure if they had something similar to Plano that was getting a lot of relocations.

LendingTree's recent analysis shows Dallas as the 9th most valuable city in America according to residential real estate with a value of $549 billion dollars, equivalent to the entire GDP of Sweden ... Dallas is the only Texas city to make the top 10.

Wow, our real estate is among the most valuable in the nation, and we have one of the highest property tax percentages in the country, but our city still can't pay for police, keep roads in decent condition, beautify, build parks, upkeep schools, really nothing. We need a military coup at city hall.

Matt777 wrote:Wow, our real estate is among the most valuable in the nation, and we have one of the highest property tax percentages in the country, but our city still can't pay for police, keep roads in decent condition, beautify, build parks, upkeep schools, really nothing. We need a military coup at city hall.

Matt777 wrote:Wow, our real estate is among the most valuable in the nation, and we have one of the highest property tax percentages in the country, but our city still can't pay for police, keep roads in decent condition, beautify, build parks, upkeep schools, really nothing. We need a military coup at city hall.

That's not a unique situation.

All of the cities in the list above have amazing parks, public transit, police/fire departments, and publicly supported cultural institutions...... while collecting a lower property tax percentage. We have none of that, and seem to be struggling to provide even basic services like roads that don’t destroy your car with potholes. It’s gotten so bad.

Matt777 wrote:Wow, our real estate is among the most valuable in the nation, and we have one of the highest property tax percentages in the country, but our city still can't pay for police, keep roads in decent condition, beautify, build parks, upkeep schools, really nothing. We need a military coup at city hall.

The vast majority of those property taxes are going to school districts, not municipalities.

Cord1936 wrote:* It’s been so long since Houston scored a major league win in the corporate relocation game, it’s hard to hold hope that economic development can do anything substantive about Houston’s vacancy problem.

Is this referring to the entire Metropolitan area, or just Houston proper? I'm not as familiar with Houston, so I wasn't sure if they had something similar to Plano that was getting a lot of relocations.

Well, no, they don't, not really. Planned community The Woodlands finally got a bunch of office investment in the past 20 years and has landed head offices of Spanish bank BBVA's holding company for the US market, as well as US Oncology and some chemical and energy firms (Anadarko and Huntsman come to mind, but there are others). AonHewitt's branch there has a lot of employees. But that submarket, at 15-16 MMsf, is only half the size of Upper Tollway/Legacy's 31MMsf.

Steadier DFW and stop-start Hou have managed to average out to around the same pace of growth for a few generations now, but this LendingTree data shows DFW residents' household-owned residential property now worth 22% more than Houstonians' comparable total, and it's also possible that 2017 annual metropolitan GDP numbers coming out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis this 18th of September will show DFW pull more than 20% ahead of Houston-Galveston-Sugar Land-Woodlands for the first time since statistics have been kept.

The only significant relos this decade for that area outside of straight-up energy, petrochemicals, or engineering services (that I can think of) have been Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America (oilfield compressors, etc.; only 40 jobs, though), Daikin/Goodman (air conditioner factory, warehouse, and R&D, but 39+ miles northwest of downtown), and Topeka, Kansas' Menninger Clinic, which opened its psychiatric campus in 2012 after moving to Houston in 2003.

As Tnekster noted on our recent subforum thread concerning Hines' groundbreaking for a 47-floor office tower in Downtown Houston... with fifty million square feet of office already vacant... 'there's no shortage of optimism down there'... but I've seen that optimism extend to the belief that they're highly diversified, and it just gives them too much credit where credit isn't at all yet due.

Sysco food supplies; Waste Management Inc.; a car dealer/collision center company called Group 1; the car and truck distributor Friedkin Group holdings; Academy Sports and Outdoors chains; Fertitta Entertainment; American Nat'l Insurance in Galveston; Insperity in Kingwood; and aforementioned US Oncology and BBVA are basically the entire list of their public or private HQs outside of the energy, chemicals and engineering businesses. Even large healthcare providers based there like MemorialHermann remain far smaller than Dallas rivals Tenet or Baylor Scott & White.

That may give Houston-Galveston a chance to become more regionally distinctive while Dallas becomes more nationally generic -- but, by that very same token, in almost every industry nationwide, DFW economically seems to be an ever more attractive relo site to high performing employees as compared to how attractive Houston is for their industry.

HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – Forty-three full floors of sublease office space will be returned to Houston building owners within the next 12 months as the term of the leases expire, according to a new report by Colliers International.

Here is BEA's new estimate of the largest 2017 metropolitan statistical areas by nominal (current-dollar) annual GDP --

$1,718 billion for greater NY$1,044 billion for LA-Orange County (a much smaller geography than greater NY, so apples to oranges)$680 billion in Chicagoland$535 billion in DFW$530 billion in DC-VA-MD-WV (not including metro Baltimore)$501 billion for San Francisco area$490 billion for Houston-Galveston$445 billion in Philly-Wilmington (not including Trenton or Reading)$439 billion in metro Boston$386 billion in metro Atlanta

San Francisco leaps into third at $776 billion total if Silicon Valley is included in it -- over 2X the tenth-ranked Atlanta metro GDP.

Where the Metroplex does even better, however, is in GDP gain. Here's all American metros that during 2001-2017 (when comparable statistics have been kept) have added >$50 billion per year to their productivity. Could have been even higher if we spent less time here on DallasMetropolis!

HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – Forty-three full floors of sublease office space will be returned to Houston building owners within the next 12 months as the term of the leases expire, according to a new report by Colliers International.

North Texas is embracing tech and getting more upbeat about its future.

A survey released Wednesday says Dallas-area residents are increasingly optimistic about the area growing as a tech hub, according to a new Capital One Future Edge DFW report. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that major tech companies will increase their presence in the region in the next decade. That’s a 30 percent increase from a similar study conducted by Capital One (NYSE: COF) two years ago.

Aren't we already a pretty good 'tech hub'. Austin gets the nod all the time for its tech jobs, but I'm pretty sure I heard there are quite a few more tech jobs here in DFW. The difference is, is that we just don't have the reputation for being one. I guess maybe that's partly because our tech jobs aren't as 'sexy', or that DFW is way more diverse when it comes to jobs so, not only do we excel at tech, but we excel at many other industries as well.

DPatel304 wrote:Aren't we already a pretty good 'tech hub'. Austin gets the nod all the time for its tech jobs, but I'm pretty sure I heard there are quite a few more tech jobs here in DFW. The difference is, is that we just don't have the reputation for being one. I guess maybe that's partly because our tech jobs aren't as 'sexy', or that DFW is way more diverse when it comes to jobs so, not only do we excel at tech, but we excel at many other industries as well.

This also "Never in my real estate career have I seen so many national law firms opening Dallas offices. It is simply unprecedented," Phil Puckett, Executive Vice President and leader of CBRE's Law Firm Practice Group in Dallas, said in a new report.

I'm not sure if many of you watch the markets like I do, but things haven't been so great the past few weeks. On Jim Cramer today, he made a very convincing case for oil prices plunging in the next year.

I don't need to remind everyone how important oil business is in Texas. Obviously Houston comes mind as an oil city (and certainly smaller oil cities like Midland, where the local Motel 6 will set you back $150/night). The Dallas area still has ties to oil with the likes of Hunt Oil downtown and Exxon-Mobil in Irving. I'm sure Headington is glad they diversified away from oil, however, if we head for a full scale recession (like many are whispering), I don't see how it doesn't adversely affect their luxury hotel (Joule) and soon to open luxury apartments (Davis).

But then again, I gather the Dallas area was pretty well insulated during the recession of 2008.

OPEC helped create the monster that haunts its sleep. After it flooded the market in 2014, oil prices crashed, forcing surviving U.S. shale producers to get leaner so they could thrive even with lower oil prices. As prices recovered, so did drilling.

So if I'm hearing you right, the gameplan is to tank a bunch of already precarious nation-states, gloat that they will turn to the Chinese for stability, and somehow imagine that the dramatic expansion of China's geopolitical control -- that will come from this "over-a-barrel" dealmaking situation -- would not end up costing Texas militarily even more than it gains us in cash in the short run? Get back to us on that one, pardner.

Thanks for sharing! I've probably said this numerous times already, but I really do think this next decade is DFW's time to shine. The last 10-15 years, we sorta shared the spotlight with Austin and Houston, but things are really coming together for DFW, and I think we will perform noticeably better than other Texas cities.

Either way, it's all good, because all major cities in Texas are booming, and that's a wonderful thing!

I had heard that (at the height of the boom) DFW was adding ~300-400 residents a day, I just wasn't sure how consistent that number was. Although the boom cycle has been lasting a while, I just assumed whoever first released that number just took a snapshot of some of our best months and released that statistic, but to be able to still pull those types of numbers in 2018 is a great sign. I'm curious to see how we will fare from here on out, as things seem to be slowing down a tad.

Also, I'm really impressed with Uptown's office occupancy rates. I already knew it was a strong market, but I always figured we were still a ways behind Plano. Turns out I was pretty wrong, and Uptown has a solid lead Plano (at least for 2018). Maybe it just happens to be due to the fact that Uptown added a lot of new office space more recently, while Plano seems to have boomed more a couple years ago? Either way, great news for both areas and the metroplex as a whole, and excited to hear what 2019 has in store.

Overall, yes I agree too. As long as DFW still performs relatively well, I'm fine with that. There's only so much we can do, as a city, and if the entire country is experiencing a bit of a slowdown, you can't really fault individuals cities for also slowing down with it.

DPatel304 wrote:I had heard that (at the height of the boom) DFW was adding ~300-400 residents a day, I just wasn't sure how consistent that number was.

I'm sure these numbers are just derived from the annual numbers divided by 365. The usual government snapshots of 100-150k residents being added to dfw yearly for nearly the last two decades would indicate that 273-410 people are moving to the metro per day.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see residential real estate prices make a correction. I feel that they have been artificially high for a couple of years now. I expected a slight correction a year ago, but I think some of the Amazon buzz may have propped them up a little. As that ship has sailed (or has it?), I think we will see a more noticeable drop.

As for office space... We have been under priced for quite some time. I see some markets stagnating, but I wouldn't be surprised if Downtown and Las Colinas creep up. I don't see much change in occupancy rates... perhaps a small increase. We will continue to have companies move into the area, but new construction, such as Cypress Waters and Collin county, will fill much of that need. Overall absorption will continue to be robust.

Dallas Retail and Hotel Construction Plows AheadDespite significant headwinds and the threat of recession, commercial construction in North Texas is booming.

by Jeremiah Jensen, D Magazine Commercial Real Estate, Feb. 14, 2019

Dallas construction activity remains strong in 2019 ...

According to data from JLL, Dallas ranks among the top commercial construction markets in the country, with 3.3 million square feet of retail development and 7,454 hotel rooms underway, putting it in the No. 4 and No. 3 spots, respectively.

It Would Take Something Drastic To Derail DFW Industrial by Dees Stribling, Dallas Bisnow, February 19, 2019

Now is an exceptional time in the Metroplex industrial market, according to the speakers at Bisnow's DFW Industrial & Logistics Outlook event. There is high demand for space, but supply isn't keeping up, so there are low vacancies, rising rents and a race to find new sites. ...The dynamics of the Metroplex industrial market mirror the national metrics: In DFW over the last six years, about 120M SF of industrial has been absorbed, while 118M SF has been built, according to the speakers.

Has Robust Industrial Development In McKinney And Beyond Turned Oklahoma Into A Suburb Of Dallas? by Kerri Panchuk, Dallas Bisnow, March 5, 2019

Only 200 miles of highway separates Downtown Dallas from the Oklahoma border, and if industrial development in the Dallas suburb of McKinney and its outer bounds continues apace, Oklahoma will soon become a suburb of the DFW metropolitan area, commercial real estate experts say. And this time, they’re not kidding.

No joke. Good grief, how can a journalist be so clueless? FWIW, the actual distance from downtown Dallas to the Oklahoma border is more like 75 miles; 200 miles would take you past Oklahoma City. Truly pathetic.

And don't spill the beans to Kerri Panchuk, but Durant, Oklahoma was already added to the DFW combined metropolitan area.

No joke. Good grief, how can a journalist be so clueless? FWIW, the actual distance from downtown Dallas to the Oklahoma border is more like 75 miles; 200 miles would take you past Oklahoma City. Truly pathetic.

And don't spill the beans to Kerri Panchuk, but Durant, Oklahoma was already added to the DFW combined metropolitan area.

I was about to say that you don't even have to leave your chair to get this right... Then I ask Alexa "How far is Oklahoma"Alexa: "Oklahoma is 196 miles away by car..." Me: "WTF?"

She must be navigating to the CENTER of Oklahoma... or maybe OKC. LOL I guess we know where this writer got their data.

Dallas-Fort Worth led the state in hotel revenue in 2018....DFW hotels took in revenue of almost $3.3 billion last year — more than any other metro area in the state. The Houston-Baytown area was a distant second with about $2.5 billion in revenue....DFW had three of the top 10 revenue-per-room hotels in Texas last year, including the No. 1 revenue producer, Uptown's Ritz-Carlton. Downtown Dallas' Joule Hotel and the Mansion on Turtle Creek also made the statewide list of the top-performing hotels in 2018....https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2019/03/06/d-fw-tops-texas-hotel-revenues

Would be interesting to see how these numbers looked if they took airbnb into account. I'm sure a much larger fraction of Austin rentals are through house 'sharing' apps since their tourism market is so strong.

D-FW second only to New York in January job growthDallas-Fort Worth added 100,100 jobs year-over-year in January, making it the second-largest driver of job growth in the U.S. behind New York, which added 141,000 jobs.

D-FW's January unemployment rate was 3.9 percent, down slightly from the year before, when it was at 4.1 percent.

DPatel304 wrote:I had heard that (at the height of the boom) DFW was adding ~300-400 residents a day, I just wasn't sure how consistent that number was. Although the boom cycle has been lasting a while, I just assumed whoever first released that number just took a snapshot of some of our best months and released that statistic, but to be able to still pull those types of numbers in 2018 is a great sign. I'm curious to see how we will fare from here on out, as things seem to be slowing down a tad.

Those 2018 numbers aren't coming from anything like an official source, though they are in line with what DFW has been adding over the past 4 years. Census population estimates for July 1, 2018 for counties and metro areas aren't coming out until next month. (States have already been released, and cities come out in May).

The yearly population increase of DFW from July of the previous year to July of the listed year:2011: +120,0002012: +134,0002013: +111,0002014: +133,0002015: +150,0002016: +152,0002017: +146,000

And considering that DFW housing construction (measured in building permits) was actually higher in 2018 than in 2017, which itself was higher than 2016, I'd expect that population growth to continue for a while longer. And if not, well.. affordable housing!